Jerry Brown says he's willing to raise taxes: 'I have no future'

Gov. Jerry Brown came to the Senate Appropriations Committee on Monday April 3, 2017 to pitch his 10-year, $5.2 billion-a-year tax increase plan to fix California roads. He said lawmakers should act now, because the next governor will be hesitant

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Gov. Jerry Brown came to the Senate Appropriations Committee on Monday April 3, 2017 to pitch his 10-year, $5.2 billion-a-year tax increase plan to fix California roads. He said lawmakers should act now, because the next governor will be hesitant

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Democrats who control the California Legislature – and even have two-thirds supermajorities in both houses – may be learning the same lesson.

Gov. Jerry Brown and a powerful business-labor-local government coalition want more than $5 billion a year in new taxes and fees for highway maintenance and other transportation purposes.

They unveiled the package last week and hope to move it quickly, before an opposition campaign can coalesce. However, with just hours remaining before a spring break begins, they have been unable, so far, to assemble the required two-thirds legislative votes because a few Democrats are reluctant to support it.

Polling indicates that imposing billions of dollars in new levies is a hard sell in a state which already has one of the nation’s highest taxation burdens – taxes that voters themselves would have to pay, not just impose on cigarette smokers or the wealthy.

Republicans, meanwhile, are unwilling to provide votes to cover the shortage. Instead, the GOP feeds the widespread, if erroneous, belief that new taxes are needed only because the state has diverted billions of transportation dollars to other purposes.

Democrats have hoped that if they were one vote short in the Senate, they might get Modesto Republican Anthony Cannella, who’ll be forced out of the Legislature by term limits next year, to come aboard.

Cannella proposed changes in transportation policy, implying that with them, he’d be open to supporting taxes, and the coalition aired ads to push him. But they may have backfired. “It would be more effective to focus on the issues I have brought up the last 2 years than post ads,” Cannella tweeted Saturday.

As Brown et al twist legislative arms in private, they’re also applying public pressure. They staged a rally in Concord last week, clearly aimed at Democratic Sen. Steven Glazer, one of the holdouts, and plan another in Riverside Tuesday, targeting Democratic Sen. Richard Roth.

Brown touted the package to two legislative committees Monday, telling one: “The roads are broken and they are getting worse, and they are not going to get better unless we get a significant injection of money.”

Brown characterized it as a gesture so the trucking industry would support sharp increases in diesel fuel taxes, and the criticism didn’t prevent the Senate Appropriations Committee from sending the centerpiece measure, Senate Bill 1, to the Senate floor for a showdown vote later this week.

About This Blog

Dan Walters’ column appeared in dozens of California newspapers. He joined the Sacramento Union’s Capitol bureau in 1975 and in 1981 began writing the state’s only daily newspaper column devoted to California political, economic and social events. In 1984 he moved to The Sacramento Bee, where his column ran until 2017.